Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (22)

 On the Saturdays or Sundays when I often went to borrow folk song and pop song music books, containing lyrics and guitar chords diagrams, for free from either the New York Public Library's Lincoln Center branch or from the upstairs Music Department of the Brooklyn Public Library's central library branch at Grand Army Plaza, I also can't recall ever meeting anybody I knew or had known in these library, speaking to anyone else in the library or meeting any new person to talk to inside the library.

One Saturday afternoon, though, while I was walking lpast the fountain in Lincoln Center Plaza, on the way towards the New York Public Library branch there, a mother, who seemed to be in her late 40s and her teenage daughter suddenly approached me. And the white teenage daughter handed me a spare ticket for a rear seat for the last part of some afternoon performance on that day. No longer recall what was being performed on that day, but I did go into the Lincoln Center auditorium for free and watched the last half of the performance for free.

Being able to borrow for free the library songbooks with guitar chord diagrams and song lyrics saved me a lot of money in the 1970s. And much of my time when I was in my apartment while working at the New American Library was spent playing, practicing and singing to myself the songs contained in the various songbooks. In addition, the Music Department at the Brooklyn Public Library's Grand Army Plaza central branch then contained in its vertical files a lot of hard-to-find material that Sing Out! magazine had published or distributed during the 1950s and early 1960s.

So, looking back after so many decades, the time I spent borrowing a lot of songbooks from the pbulic libraries during the 1970s probably helped deepen my ability to later continue to pump out new public domain folk songs during the following decades.

Aside from writing the "Live Like Cinque" folk song around this time and perhaps the melody and first lyrical version of the "I Saw You Today" folk song, I no longer recall any folk songs I may have written while publicity clerkin' at NAL. Could be that I then wrote a song, titled "Stupidity"--which I no longer remember--that attempted to expose the degree to which intellectually and morally "stupid" folks were then ruling and enslaving the majority of people in the USA during the 1970s, around this time?

And it could be that around this time I wrote a love song like "Open Your Arms" for an old womanfriend who was living in the Midwest, while I was living in Brooklyn. And although I did, at times, use my cheap portable cassette tape player to occasionally record some of the songs which I then wrote, within a few years I no longer saved any of these cassette tapes with most of these particular new songs; and neither did I save most of the lyrci sheets for any of these new folk songs I may have written while working at NAL.